Discovery & Probing

Discovery & Probing. Enumeration can serve two distinct purposes in an assessment: OS Fingerprinting Remote applications being served. OS fingerprinting or TCP/IP stack fingerprinting is the process of determining the operating system being utilised on a remote host. This is carried out by analyzing packets received from the host in question. There are two distinct ways to OS fingerprint, actively (i.e. nmap) or passively (i.e. scanrand). Passive OS fingerprinting determines the remote OS utilising the packets received only and does not require any packets to be sent. Active OS fingerprinting is very noisy and requires packets to be sent to the remote host and waits for a reply, (or lack thereof). Disparate OS's respond differently to certain types of packet, (the response is governed by an RFC and any proprietary responses the vendor (notably Microsoft) has enabled within the system) and so custom packets may be sent. Remote applications being served on a host can be determined by an open port on that host. By port scanning it is then possible to build up a picture of what applications are running and tailor the test accordingly.

Enumeration tools and techniques - The vast majority can be used generically, however, certain bespoke application require there own specific toolsets to be used. Default passwords are platform and vendor specific